


since dark (is what brings out your light)

by Fallwater023



Category: Elfquest, Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Character Death, Clone Wars, Crossover, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Flashbacks, Gen, Grief/Mourning, IN SPACE!, Interspecies Awkwardness, Jedi, Master & Padawan Relationship(s), Oneshot, Original Character Death(s), Original Character(s), POV Original Character, Padawan, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychic Bond, Racism, War, i guess anyway - Freeform, i know about as much of Star Wars canon as a novice in a nunnery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-03
Updated: 2015-12-03
Packaged: 2018-05-04 16:37:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5341067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fallwater023/pseuds/Fallwater023
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two young padawans from Abode come to terms with the end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	since dark (is what brings out your light)

**Author's Note:**

> I guess I'm in this fandom now? Yay? Seriously I know very little of Star Wars canon. Elfquest is much more my area of expertise. This has been sitting on my drive for awhile so I thought I'd get it out there.

It was over. 

It was in fact over. Sapling had been sitting here looking at her hands for almost an hour. It had all been over for a little less than that. People were dancing in the streets of this tough little backwater planet where just yesterday they had been blowing each other up to control the bacta supply that flowed through them. Bacta for clones, bacta for soldiers. Bacta to keep a little civilian girl breathing when the armies blew up her school. 

Now they were dancing, somebody was screaming out laughter and the whole city was well on its way to drunk. 

The offworld liquor didn’t exist that would get a Sojourner hammered. She needed dreamberries. _Somnifebris letumi._ If she wanted to get well and truly sloshed it would take enough febrotoxin to boil a bantha in its skin, not because she was a Jedi Padawan _(losing side losing side)_ but because of these four-fingered hands and the pulse that made them shake. 

She needed dreamberries. Sapling hated the thought as soon as it came but she _needed_ dreamberries, sweet prickly wine or the fresh fruit salty-tart on the tongue, the rich burning aftertaste. She needed to not be in her own head. Needed to go-out on a vision far from here, see some future where she wasn’t sitting in a public library on zwoot-fucking _Arneb_ where yesterday she had been holed up ready to die. Staring at her hands and shaking like a cubling. Like the frail little sapling that was her name, the tree outside her mother’s den that shattered from frost the night she was born. Wouldn’t even take a hard winter to make her crack apart right now. All it would take is someone looking at the right angle to see right through her. 

She needed dreamberries. It was a weakness in her father’s line, going back far in the howls they kept but didn’t tell outside their family - too easy to wander off into storytelling and forget the body. Maybe that was why the Council had come and taken her, out of all the tribes of her people. A little nothing nobody Jackwolf, common as dirt in the Sarazen canyon country. Not even a bond-friend to her name. Too easy for her to wander off and leave her body behind. 

“Hoy, Nisar’zen.” 

Her shoulders curled up before she could stop it. She was more used to hearing ‘wolf-demon’ or ‘child-eater’ from that voice, old slurs that had lost their sting in the relentless throb of homesickness marking off her temple days. It hurt, brought up old race-memories of fire and blood, but it was familiar. Tasted of twin-moonlight and dreamberry sap on the night air. 

They had taken one other from her planet, little Abode with its Mother Moon and Child Moon. Cruelly, from the same people that had taken so much from hers, the Djunlander humans who had given Elvish its word for war. 

“Padawan Sansar,” she muttered, barely feeling her lips and tongue. Her face felt like the frozen minute after being punched, before the pain hit. 

He squatted next to her. “Well, don’t march out the welcome procession,” Sansar growled, hunching up his shoulders and dropping his head. He was trying to look her in the eye. A worse intrusion than being felt up by a stranger, when she was this far out of her head. He wasn’t kin, his eyes too small, his face too square and heavy. She coiled her hands into fists and started to drop her shoulders down into her lap, but before she could go fully into the fetal position - not very mature and Force-worthy but it would get the round-ear to leave her _alone_ touched her hand. Took her fist in both of his and just - held it. Not trying to peel open her fingers _(take her fingers smash her fingers burn the demon)_ but just, just held it. Careful as he might cup a baby bird. 

“What are you doing, Padawan Sansar.” She didn’t have the energy to make it a question. 

He just furrowed his brow at her - why did humans need such big eyebrows when their eyes were so tiny, it was ridiculous - and traced a fingertip over her knuckles. It was more distracting than it should be. One blunt square fingertip tracing three delicate bumps, feeling out scar tissue and callouses. “You had a break here,” he said, and she could feel the faint thrum of his Force-inquiry under the tissue, feeling out the path of the fracture. “Hard to break Elf bones.” 

She turned her eyes to their hands, her hand in his, the tiny throb of an old wound in the warmth of it. “Tried to catch a grenade.” 

He raised his eyebrows at the same time he dropped his chin. She felt the insane urge to giggle. After everything _(all over)._ “Tried to catch a - sorry, did you leave your brain in your other tunic that day?” 

It wasn’t a laugh, alright, it was a snort. Just a push of air through her nose. “I was going to throw it but then there wasn’t a window. So I pulled up a Force shield. Gave me three hairline fractures and an all-over bruise, but I kept the hand.” 

Sansar shook his head. “Threk’sht, you elves. _No_ self-preservation.” 

This she remembered too. It had taken Sansar of all people to explain to the Temple healers that she wasn’t self-harming, it was just that elves were accustomed to having healers strong in the Elvish gift that could seal life-threatening wounds in minutes. She hadn’t worried about falling or burning herself since she was a kitling. That recklessness paired with the new and exciting perils of the temple caused an endless stream of minor and major injuries in her training. “Better than being a lumbering-herdbeast human. Can’t imagine how you cope.” 

And that had worried their Temple masters for a long time, too, the struggle Sansar and Sapling had had to fit in with the _enlightened_ environment. Sapling had inherited the race-memory of every tragedy, every genocide and witch-burning and simple murder. All at five-fingered hands. Sansar’s rough manners with Sapling and with the many alien species who resembled Abodean Sojourners made the Temple a difficult place for him. He was a human among other humans, but in many ways he had been more alone than she. 

Sansar had asked leave from the Matron to celebrate his people’s rituals. _Just a bowl of milk,_ he said, looking embarrassed. Didn’t think she’d heard, even with her elf-ears. But that night and every night after she got up and had a midnight snack, and every morning Sansar’s bowl was empty. 

Well, it was for her, wasn’t it? Or her people, anyway, and she was the only one within three thousand light years. Shame to waste perfectly good milk. 

“Well, we get on fine,” he said, looking across the square. This little garden gallery had been a decent tactical vantage, and it still had a good view of the comings and goings between the capitol building and the entertainment quarter. Arnebian _nuhai_ music was already thrumming and pattering in the air, the cries of laughter so different in rhythm from the screaming sobbing battlefield this had been last week. “We get on. Not a lot of time to do it in.” 

Her mouth quirked. “Must be nice.” His chin twitched in her direction and his hands tightened around hers, a silent question. Sapling jerked a chin at the party. “Eat, drink and be merry. Forget yesterday and tomorrow.” She let another little quietness dangle before finishing the thought forming in her head aloud. “My people used to have it, the, the Now of Wolf-thought. But the Jackwolves never really had it, too close to the Sun-Villagers, and even most of the Wolfriders living in the Now have died out. Maybe a couple of Go-Backs still think that way. Fight, die, leave a fawn to take your place.”

His head thumped back against the pillar, and he grinned up at the sky. “Don’t rightly know what my people would call it. You don’t get into existential philosophy with a six-year-old. All I know’s a bit about Threk’sht and the Good Spirits - ,” and she couldn’t keep it together anymore, she was going to laugh or she was going to fall apart and laughter was the path of least resistance. “Hoy!” and now he was laughing too. “Alright, _Good Spirit,”_ and now he was kneeling, oh High Ones it was too funny, “I beseech thee, O Good Spirit of the woodland - ,” he was still holding her hand, it was hilarious, this was the funniest thing that had ever happened to her, “ - hear my prayer! Receive my - _hah_ \- offering!” 

And somewhere in shaking with laughter she started shaking with sobs too. Just couldn’t catch her breath. Now he had hands on her shoulders, five-finger weight and heat boxing her in. She flailed a bit, breath catching in a fragment of howl-memory, then remembered it was _Padawan Sansar_ and he was a fellow Jedi and he wouldn’t, it was just her mind being _stupid._

It took awhile to get her breath back, and another little while to clean the snot off her face. By the end of it they were side by side again and she was listing exhausted onto his shoulder. Sojourner standoffishness forgotten. She just needed something to help keep her balance. “Master Sortolkin died today,” she murmured in a blown-out voice. 

And now it was Sansar’s turn to cry, she guessed, and feeling like a hollow reed being leaned on by a windstorm she let him choke and shudder under her awkwardly propped arm. “M-master Yun,” he moaned, and with another whale-sound of grief curled up like a dying insect. His face seemed unusually hot against her shoulder. She supposed it was his strange human hangup about crying - a lot of the human boys struggled with it at the Temple, mistaking mastery of emotion for a matter of strength over weakness instead of a balance point between need and want. But Sansar took it to the next level. There was a point just before their Padawan choosing where he would have rather crawled into a gully and died than cried in front of someone else. Master Yun had softened him up a bit, gotten him to bend like the reed rather than snap like the oak in the face of emotion. 

Xe was gone now, a good Master and a good Jedi, back into the Force that surrounded them all. Gone with Master Sortolkin to a place they could not follow. 

Death didn’t mean the same thing to Sojourners as it did to most other species. She wasn’t built to feel this - this absolute loss. The hollowness where her master should be. She could talk to her five-greats-grandsire and her little cousin who died of a milk fever as easy as to any other person, if she but visited the Palace. The Force was not so easy nor so kind. It was not _meant_ to be kind or good, Master Sortolkin had told her, it was meant to be _right._ And it was not right for Jedi to dwell on the spirits of the dead. 

He would not be allowed to stay with her, or ruffle her hair as he had done so many times. He would not stand vigil by her bedside as she healed from the war. He would not cut the Padawan braid from her hair when she passed her trials, releasing their bond into the Force when she joined him as an equal. 

He was gone, and Sapling was empty. Shattered in the frost.


End file.
